Health
Society
Mental Health
Research
Demographics
Demographic Change
Sweden
Anxiety and Depression
Fertility choices
Survey work
Finland
Revealed preferences
My piece today at @FamStudies tackles an issue I've come to think is at the heart of demographic change: anxiety and depression.
Research suggests fertility choices are highly sensitive to mental health, which is deteriorating rapidly in America. ifstudies.org
Research suggests fertility choices are highly sensitive to mental health, which is deteriorating rapidly in America. ifstudies.org
The paper provides some charts and graphs from my survey work, and also reviews an extremely compelling paper which came out of Sweden and Finland. I think that paper is pretty definitive, and the evidence I've presented suggests it is externally valid for other places too.
But a key point I want to emphasize here on twitter is this question of "Why do people have fewer children than they desire?"
A common answer is basically to appeal to revealed preferences over and against stated preferences: the statements are just wrong.
A common answer is basically to appeal to revealed preferences over and against stated preferences: the statements are just wrong.
But this comes from a rational choice perspective which suggests that individual agents in fact are freely making their own choices, that their mind is completely their own. In other words, it assumes that agents do not experience significant mental illness.
I actually think this is a really important broad meta-critique of rational choice theory writ large. I'm not arguing for some behavioralist cognitive bias position. I'm arguing that a lot of agents have minds at war with themselves.
Rational choice theory is radically monistic in its conception of the self, at least as far as revealed preferences go. We assume that the actions people take represent some kind of disclosure of an approximately stable and coherent self.
But, what if it doesn't?
But, what if it doesn't?
What if, instead, the agential self is divided? What if it experiences internal constraints on desired action? This is the basic state of people with severe anxiety or depression: they find themselves unable to take actions they believe are in their interests!
A more serious engagement with how mental illness should fit into models of human behavior is long overdue throughout all the disciplines that dabble in rational choice style models, especially as prevalence is rising.
If lots of agents experience undesired anhedonism, this severely complicates who we think about preference revelation and basic concepts like willingness to pay.
Likewise, this suggests that the extent to which rational choice assumptions are well-founded is in some sense dependent on the kinds of mental illnesses which prevail in a society.
Anyways, this is some broad theorization, but for fertility the argument is clear. A big reason people undershoot their fertility desires is they are anxious, depressed, and unhappy, and feel unable to enact life-improving behaviors for psycho-emotional reasons.
They aren't revealing a preference for childlessness. Depression and anxiety are thwarting their preferences.
This is part of why I think we should see fertility gaps as "real problems." Regardless of if they *cause* unhappiness, they certainly *are caused by* unhappiness.
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